Pootoogook learned to carve from his master carver father, Lukta, and has been sculpting for many years. He also was a printmaker for eight of the Cape Dorset annual print collections and studied in the jewellery program at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Pootoogook has exhibited widely and was included in the 1989 “Masters of the Arctic: An Exhibition of Contemporary Inuit Masterworks” that toured for many years.